IT Resume Critique

jjasso21

I had a little help with Career Builder doing my resume about a year ago. Since then I revamped it quite a bit since then, giving it many extra sections and moving others around. I removed my personal information such as name, phone number, email and website info. Can I get some kind of critique in order to improve it?

ptilsen

Start with some of the advice here:
http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/13582-resumes-dos-donts-guide-line-getting-contacted.html

Using Career Builder or Monster to make your resume is a bad idea.

Your education is not formatted properly. It would be easy to skim the resume and miss your certs or not see what your MS is in. Try something like this, to start:

Master of Science, Information Systems Management, Information Security [tab] October, 2011
Bachelor of Science, Computer Information Systems [tab] June, 2010

Something like that. You can still list honors and GPA. Certifications can go in the same heading "Education", but should be clearly differentiated from degree. Remove the dates form the certifications. If they are active the date does not matter. If they were not active (I realize yours are), you would list (Expired) or not list them.

Your hard skills should be listed as several bullets of related items or as a table. A single bullet of three lines is hard to sift through. You also want to cut down your skills to those that are relevant, meaningful, and that you truly possess. You can adjust these based on the job to which you apply, but for the most part you won't change it much. Are you actually fairly well versed in programming, or are you just listing languages you took a class or three on? Do you think prospective employers want you to build gaming PCs? Do you not know anything about switching and routing, servers, Active Directory, etc? The Capstone project might be worth leaving in, but I would take out your other school projects otherwise (unless you are applying for software development or programming-heavy jobs).

Really, think about what kind of job you're looking for. Are you looking to be a programmer? Your skills and education are all over the place. If you want to get into security, lets see some security specific stuff. If you want to just get a helpdesk job, see about some skills a helpdesk needs. I'm not disputing the benefit of programming, but it's typically not what a helpdesk is looking for.

Given your lack of IT experience, you should play up the freelance work as much as possible. It would be good to try to highlight good customer service and anything noteworthy, not just basic descriptions of what you did. This is the most common piece of advice given out on these forums in regards to resume (that, or the Summary of Qualifications advice). Also, "etc." pretty much does not belong on a resume in any circumstances. The whole experience section might confuse HR as you effectively have "three" jobs.

Summary is completely wrong. If you have a summary at all, it should be a short (2-3 sentence) paragraph. No bullet points. I really can't emphasize short enough. I have never had one on my resume and I don't intend to change that anytime soon.

Order things as such:
Summary (if applicable)
Skills
Experience
Education (including certifications)

Fit it all in one page, with body text in 10 or 11 Arial, Calibri, or a similar sans-serif font. Use tables or formatting style to get your employment dates lined up. One common method is to simply list it on the left. The harder, but better way is to use a table with the cells on the far right with left-aligned text. Don't be afraid to use any combination of font sizes, italics, bold, and/or underline to separate job title, employer, emplyer location, and date of employment. Ideally, all of these should be something clearly different from the body text itself.

jjasso21

Thanks for the comments. I'll reorganize the resume according to the job position. I'll create a separate one simply for programming and another for the infrastructure side of things. Also I'll reorganize the education and include certifications there in there as well.